Dali House

If not in person, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has to be seen large. There’s a very good scan on this page at the Athenaeum.

There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno’s bells, the uncouth shapes and colours which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. — Kenneth Clark, “Looking at Pictures”

It’s a pretty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1885 and we’re having a petit bourgeois luncheon on the grass on on an island in the Seine. La Grande Jatte — the Big Bowl — near Neuilly has been cleaned up considerably after all those years as an industrial canker. There are restaurants and joints where you can dance further along the island, though still lots of factories on the far riverbank, which is why not everyone wants to come here. But now this end of the Jatte is a marvellous green get-away for city folks like us, nice breezes off the river, and we’re doing our best to muck it up with dog shit.

That woman with the monkey is here again too. She keeps it on a leash but it still defecates at the drop of a peanut and alarms the old ladies. Someone ought to complain to the gendarme, but he’s only here for the flirting.

After our quiche we’ll go pester that young Seurat at his easel again. He’s here almost every day, same as last summer, pecking away at his canvases like a pigeon. Millions of little dots. One picture after another. What the hell can he be thinking? He’s such a grouch too — good-looking fellow, nicely dressed, but he definitely deserves to have both of his legs pulled!

Georges-Pierre Seurat was 25 that summer, and if was anti-social, he had a brace of fair reasons. His father, who was in the law game, was a stick in the mud who only showed up at home on Tuesdays; the rest of the week he was at his country villa pecking away at his flower garden like a pigeon. Georges came by his stand-offishness honestly. And besides that, he really had something to prove with his painting. Now was not the time for distractions. See the rest.

The 1600 version of “The Judgement of Paris” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), which was based on Raphael’s. Rubens did at least three variations, but we’ll get to that.

And the Internet always tosses up three different renditions of Salvador Dali’s “Judgement of Paris”, and I’m not sure they’re all correct. He did his etching in the mid-1960s for a series called “Mythologie”. Have a look at this post for a bit more information on the subject.

Hacking into the legend of the Trojan War and all the paint that’s been poured into recording the event that started it.

The riveting soap opera played out in and around the myth that has for 3,000 years been known as “the Judgement of Paris” has for just as long had artists falling all over each other to get their versions down on canvas. Of course, all of Greek mythology has been painted as many times as Tom Sawyer’s picket fence, including the whole Trojan War ball of yarn back to front, but consider this particular episode:

* Three of history’s most beautiful women practically or altogether nude, and each aquiver with naked jealousy
* A guy — Joe Average — called upon to be the judge in their divine beauty pageant
* God the Father watching with keen interest
* And the fate of human civilisation teetering in the balance.

Who could resist subject matter like this? No one!

The Judgement in porcelain, from about 500 BCE, at Rome’s Capitoline Museums.

For centuries it was the ancient Greek and Roman scribes who had their way with the tale, complete with ribald humour, while the pot-painters of their time fumbled with the essentials. Finally, though, the more modern artists who knew how to depict lust properly got their chance and set up their easels on Mount Ida, where Paris was tending his sheep, an odd thing for him to be doing, since he was a prince of Troy.

Paris must have wondered why he was suddenly the designated model for an art class, but then he had had his moment of fame: He’d been the adjudicator in a bullfight — his own bull against a bovine who turned out to be Ares (not Taurus). Ares, to no one’s surprise, won.

Raphael’s “Judgement of Paris” is in fact the engraving made from it in 1515 by Marcantonio Raimondi. Somebody lost Raphael’s copy. Not to worry, Marcantonio (c1480-c1534) was one of the best in the printmaking business, influenced by Dürer and exceedingly clever at adding in his own backdrops.

In this detail, viewers take note of a character who’s taking note of them. This is where Édouard Manet found his tableau for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in 1863. Raphael or not, polite people at the Paris Salon freaked when they saw a naked female picnicking with a couple of swank “customers”. So Manet borrowed instead from Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and painted “Olympia”, and you should have heard the howling then!

The reason for the impromptu painters’ salon in the Phrygian highlands began to dawn on Paris when Hermes, the messenger boy, turned up with three quite fetching ladies. The painter-paparazzi must have had advance notice of their coming, Paris thought.

Hermes was carrying an apple, never a good sign in these scenarios, Paris thought further, and then he stopped thinking because the women had shed their clothes and begun bathing in the Spring of Ida. Hermes would have explained to him, if he could have held his attention long enough, that he was holding the Apple of Discord, which Eris, the Goddess of Discord, had chucked onto the banquet table at a party that she’d crashed.

Girolamo Benvenuto (1470-1524), with all the gilded, not-quite-natural nature of the Sienese artisans in his day.

The banquet was another scene of which there are dozens of great paintings: a wedding party that Zeus had thrown for Peleus and Thetis, who would one day give birth to Achilles, who would one day be played by Brad Pitt in a blockbuster film that would be quickly forgotten because it didn’t have much going for it beyond a couple of pretty good swordfights.

Eris wasn’t invited because she was, well, the Goddess of Discord, and who wants discord at a party? Disco, maybe, in a pinch, but not discord. She showed up anyway and, staying in character, caused discord. The golden apple she added to the buffet, she said, without naming names, belonged to the best-looking woman in the universe.

“Why, that would be me!” said the goddess Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and also of Cuckolded Wives, who was wedded to (and cuckolded by) Zeus.

“No, me!” said the goddess Athena, who enjoyed a good hunt.

“In your dreams,” said the goddess Aphrodite, who was, after all, the Goddess of Beauty. “It’s me!”

All eyes turned to Zeus, the capo del tutti capo of Mount Olympus, who, like most chairmen of the board, was all bluff and bluster. He passed the buck and nominated Paris, the cattle judge, to decide which babe was the best looking. See the rest.

In 1955 Dali, fresh from another lecture in Paris for which he showed up in a Rolls Royce filled to the brim with cauliflowers, was home in Port-Lligat one night when a reporter from Time phoned to get his reaction to a bit of critique.
Prominent theologian Paul Tillich had told the magazine that Dali’s new painting “The Sacrament of the Last Supper”, just acquired by the National Gallery in Washington, was “junk”.

The overseas phone connection was poor. “I was not drunk!” Dali insisted. He did indeed offer a completely sober description of the picture as an “arithmetic and philosophical cosmogony based on the paranoiac sublimity of the number 12 … the maximum of luminous and Pythagorian instantaneousness, based on the celestial communion of the number 12: 12 hours of the day, 12 months of the year, the 12 pentagons of the dodecahedron, 12 signs of the zodiac around the sun, the 12 apostles around Christ … the pentagon contains microcosmic man: Christ”.

In the event, “Last Supper” was a box-office hit at the National Gallery. In terms of visitor popularity, it pushed the perennial favourite, Renoir’s “Girl with a Watering Can”, into the mud. It was, Dali boasted years later, “the best seller of all modern paintings. There are more postcard reproductions of it than any da Vinci or Raphael. My strategy worked: At a certain point I decided to do paintings that would be more popular than anything else in the world. My performance was marvellous. I would even go so far as to say that painting is a thousand times better than all of Picasso’s works put together. That one single painting!”

Claude Monet was riding a train in early 1883 when he first saw Giverny, population 300. Now the train is gone, having served its purpose in delivering him here.

Monet bought a spacious farmhouse and by May had moved in with his companion Alice Hosched, his two sons and her six children. The property came with a vegetable garden and a hectare of fruit trees. He rented until 1890, when he bought the place and turned it into an Eden with strictly enforced rules for the flora bunda. It saved him walking out into the surrounding countryside (although somehow his neighbours’ haystacks proved irresistible).

Monet didn’t want anything overly organised, and as long as the flowers were in rows of complementary colours they could grow any way they wanted. When he bought the neighbouring property across the railway in 1893and freaked out the villagers by widening the little brook called the Ru (a tendril of the Seine) into a pond, the water garden it eventually became was all askew and curvy.

The inspiration came from his collection of Japanese prints, and he topped it off with a bamboo grove the now-famous arched bridge, caressed by weeping willows. Monet made sure his gardener cruised around the pond every morning and scrubbed the railway soot off the lily pads. They had to be ready to have their portraits painted at any time. See the rest.

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside. See the rest.